Section 4

4. We must, however, avoid thinking of it as an accidental from
outside grafted upon that Nature: it is native to it, integral to it.

It is discerned as present essentially in that Nature like
everything else that we can predicate There- all immanent, springing
from that Essence and inherent to that Essence. For whatsoever has
primal Being must be immanent to the Firsts and be a First-Eternity
equally with The Good that is among them and of them and equally
with the truth that is among them.

In one aspect, no doubt, Eternity resides in a partial phase of
the All-Being; but in another aspect it is inherent in the All taken
as a totality, since that Authentic All is not a thing patched up
out of external parts, but is authentically an all because its parts
are engendered by itself. It is like the truthfulness in the Supreme
which is not an agreement with some outside fact or being but is
inherent in each member about which it is the truth. To an authentic
All it is not enough that it be everything that exists: it must
possess allness in the full sense that nothing whatever is
absent from
it. Then nothing is in store for it: if anything were to come, that
thing must have been lacking to it, and it was, therefore, not All.
And what, of a Nature contrary to its own, could enter into
it when it
is [the Supreme and therefore] immune? Since nothing can
accrue to it,
it cannot seek change or be changed or ever have made its way into
Being.

Engendered things are in continuous process of acquisition;
eliminate futurity, therefore, and at once they lose their being; if
the non-engendered are made amenable to futurity they are thrown
down from the seat of their existence, for, clearly, existence is
not theirs by their nature if it appears only as a being about to
be, a becoming, an advancing from stage to stage.

The essential existence of generated things seems to lie in
their existing from the time of their generation to the ultimate of
time after which they cease to be: but such an existence is
compact of
futurity, and the annulment of that futurity means the
stopping of the
life and therefore of the essential existence.

Such a stoppage would be true, also, of the [generated] All in
so far as it is a thing of process and change: for this reason it
keeps hastening towards its future, dreading to rest, seeking to
draw Being to itself by a perpetual variety of production and action
and by its circling in a sort of ambition after Essential Existence.

And here we have, incidentally, lighted upon the cause of the
Circuit of the All; it is a movement which seeks perpetuity by way
of futurity.

The Primals, on the contrary, in their state of blessedness have
no such aspiration towards anything to come: they are the whole,
now; what life may be thought of as their due, they possess entire;
they, therefore, seek nothing, since there is nothing future to
them, nothing external to them in which any futurity could find
lodgement.

Thus the perfect and all-comprehensive essence of the Authentic
Existent does not consist merely in the completeness inherent in its
members; its essence includes, further, its established immunity
from all lack with the exclusion, also, of all that is without
Being- for not only must all things be contained in the All
and Whole,
but it can contain nothing that is, or was ever, non-existent- and
this State and Nature of the Authentic Existent is Eternity: in our
very word, Eternity means Ever-Being.